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Page 316
of deceit. However, Ian's friends seemed glad to see him and neither hinted obliquely at trouble nor warned him openly of it. His enemies, an even better indicator, seemed healthily enraged by his profitable marriage. There were scowls and snide remarks where there should be and, although he was as watchful as he could be, Ian neither saw nor sensed hidden smirks among the king's intimates that would suggest a secret knowledge of retribution to come.
Alinor could make no clearer sense of what to expect than her husband, even after she had an interview with the king two days later. She had been summoned to a judicial session in the normal manner to make restitution to the king for marrying without her overlord's permission. Ian went with her, full armed, which was not the usual attire for answering a summons from the king. John, however, gave him hardly more than an indulgent glance, as if to say he understood the protective spirit of the gesture but that it was not necessary. And so it proved.
Alinor pleaded the danger to her estates and her son's inheritance from reavers and disloyal and disaffected vassals and castellans in extenuation of her hasty marriage. She added that, the king being at war in France, she did not know where or how to reach him or how long it would be before he returned. If John remembered that Alinor's messenger had found him without the slightest difficulty to announce Simon's death, he did not mention the fact. He allowed the plea of necessary haste and disallowed the plea of inability to request permission on the reasonable grounds that Ian had known quite well where he was and that the fighting was over by that time. Then he set the fine at a titheone tenth the value of the income from her estates. It was a heavy fine, but by no means unreasonable.
''You would have done better to take the man I chose for you," John said with a smile when Alinor had bowed her acceptance and given surety for payment of

 
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